"We've come to live in a bloody pantomime," says Charles Judd, Cartwright's morose paterfamilias, as he contemplates a Cornish retirement studded with stereotypical locals, Rick Stein recipes and top-of-the-range tractor-mowers.

But there's more to his angst than simple boredom; his beloved daughter is serving time in an American jail for fencing a stolen Tiffany window. The novel opens on the day of her release, and, as the title indicates, Cartwright explores how one recovers from a body blow once the worst is past.

His writing is never less than elegant and it wonderfully captures the contours of people's relationships – Charles's almost physical passion for his daughter, for example, contrasts sharply with the distance between him and his wife. Cartwright may seem to have limited himself to the novel of middle-class manners, but his lucid, penetrating gaze captures much more than that label suggests. AC

The Bugatti Queen by Miranda Seymour (Pocket, £7.99)

Helene Delangle was born in 1900, the daughter of a postmaster in rural France, and fled to Paris aged 18 to become Hellé-Nice, a dancer and nude model. She reinvented herself as a racing-driver and in the 1930s was the toast of circuits around the world, sponsored by Bugatti and others.

Of her countless lovers, many were also racers, and most of those were killed on the track. Bodies fly through the air thick and fast, slamming into trees and spectators; Hellé-Nice killed a man when she was thrown from her Alfa Monza into a crowd at the Sao Paolo Grand Prix. She spent the war in Nazi-occupied Nice (possibly not blamelessly), lost her money and reputation, and died in penury.

This is a book that has to draw its conclusions from events. Hellé-Nice was not given to introspection; as a female contemporary put it, "Frankly, I don't believe she ever thought about anything but sex and showing off." It makes for a racy old read. VL

Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope (Black Swan, £6.99)

Nathalie and David are adoptive brother and sister, with a bond as strong as blood: they can both trace their histories back only to their births, where the trail ends in a severed cord. They have lived their lives denying that anything has been missing, but suddenly it hits them that they have been dangling in thin air, and they decide to trace their birth mothers.

Joanna Trollope explores how this affects them, their spouses, their adoptive families and their real mothers. Her themes are rescue, obligation, control, estrangement. She is an astute psychologist and inhabits her many characters most effectively. It is only when she lets them speak for themselves that things jar a little; they explain their feelings to each other in the kind of theatrical phrasing that makes you think of drama students. VL

Literary Occasions by V S Naipaul (Picador, £8.99)

Previously published elsewhere but now printed together for the first time, these 11 essays provide a fascinating insight by Naipaul-the-critic into his own development as Naipaul-the-novelist.

The book begins with his reminiscences of growing up as an Indian in Trinidad, his early reading of Kipling, Dickens and Conrad and his lonely determination to succeed in his chosen profession as a young man in England. The collection spans more than 40 years of a writing life and culminates in his Nobel lecture.

If the best piece in the book is his reappraisal of Conrad, a novelist with whom he has much in common and with whom he clearly identifies, the most revealing is Naipaul's generous foreword to his father's only novel. Indeed, the frequently acknowledged debt he owes his father, a failed writer whose influence appears to have been the driving force behind his own ambitions, is the heart of this illuminating book. SH

As Britain's passport control officer in Berlin in the 1930s – the job was a cover for his role as MI6's head of station – Frank Foley took it upon himself to help the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. At first he bent the regulations, then, flouting the policy of Chamberlain's government, he issued visas to Palestine. Risking his life, he hid Jews fleeing the Gestapo in his home on Lessingstrasse.

Foley later played an important part in persuading Norway to fight the Germans. And he interrogated Rudolf Hess, whom he deemed insane, after the deputy Führer's flight to Scotland in 1941.

This astute biography presents fresh evidence of the depths plumbed by British appeasement. Michael Smith (defence correspondent of this paper) reveals that, in late 1938, Foley was forced, by the "olive-branch mentality" of the Foreign Office, to drop his top agent, "a very friendly colonel in Luftwaffe HQ". DI

Bay of Souls by Robert Stone (Picador, £7.99)

Michael Ahearn is a man who does not fit comfortably into his own skin: a loveless husband, a distracted father, an English professor whose literary heroes no longer inspire him and an incompetent deer hunter. He is a quintessential lost soul, acutely aware of "the diminishing possibilities of life".

He is an easy target, then, for the beautiful divorcée Lara Purcell, who scorches into his bleak Midwestern life from the Windward Islands. They begin an affair, and Stone deftly sketches the deceit by which they increase life's possibilities.

But Lara is convinced that her brother stole her soul in a voodoo ceremony and consigned it to a mystical undersea realm. Hungry for "a taste of danger", Ahearn follows Lara to her politically fraught native island, where his diving skills prove useful.

This slim novel is a mere skeleton of Stone's more full-blooded portraits of mid-life masculine malaise, but it is chilling and intense, and imparts a sharp psychological thrill. AS

The Flood by Maggie Gee (Saqi, £7.99)

The world is always on the brink of ending in Maggie Gee's apocalyptic fiction: freezing, over-heating, and in this, her ninth novel, sinking under endless rain. No matter for London's rich, who still make it to the opera in gondolas. Gee doesn't shy from thematic depths: class conflict, racism and global crisis all feature, as President Bliss prepares to attack a fictional Muslim nation.

Here is a London full of drifters, whose lives flow ever further from their aspirations, but who lack the energy to beat against the current. There's May, whose husband's death leaves her "rudderless", and Davey, a TV astronomer with a porous mind: "terror and loss were leaking in".

The novel's watery world is structured by the principle that every moment occurs not successively, but simultaneously. This makes for some plotless, sea-sick reading, but also for beautiful recurring imagery, as Gee explores the fears that sink us, and the hopes that keep us afloat. AS

Browning by Iain Finlayson (Harper Perennial, £15)

Writing to a friend about Browning's interminable poem The Ring and the Book, George Eliot asked: "Who will read it all in these busy days?"

We're even busier now, and Browning is remembered more for rescuing Elizabeth Barrett from her unspeakable father than for anything else, apart from some sentimental lyrics which, as Iain Finlayson's book reminds us, are uncharacteristic of Browning's work.

Mr Finlayson matches his prolixity with a massive 700-pager, retelling the elopement story in detail as well as attempting a clearer idea of the extraordinary person behind the works NB.

Saddam: The Secret Life by Con Coughlin (Pan, £8.99)

Here's an admirably authoritative full-length portrait of the unscrupulous thug who became increasingly unhinged as time went on.

The hardback was written before the invasion; now, in an extended update, Con Coughlin gives us the lowdown on the run-up to it (in which he reminds us that the existence or otherwise of WMDs was irrelevant once President Bush had decided, back in March 2002, to go to war) and on its aftermath, where he doesn't shrink from blaming the Americans for the ineptitude of their occupying forces.

It's clear, meanwhile, that he has little time for President Bush's mission to democratise the Arab world, and as an old Middle East hand Coughlin should know something about it. NB

It was hard to say which caused the more indignation among critics of the Allies' destruction of Dresden – the loss of a magical city, or the grisly incineration of so many thousands of people presumably uninvolved in Germany's war effort. Frederick Taylor brings back the horror of it in distressing detail. There remains a puzzle: what was the purpose of it? Even Churchill seemed unsure. Soon afterwards he wrote a secret memo, quoted here, deploring the use of "mere acts of terror, however impressive" such as the Dresden bombing. But Mr Taylor is quite clear: the city had strategic significance, he points out, as well as manufacturing munitions. NB

Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation by David A. Price (Faber, £8.99)

John Smith was among those who sailed to Virginia in 1606, where his qualities soon earned him the governance of the infant colony and the respect of the Indians. They had every reason to distrust the mercenary Englishmen, but what weighed in Smith's favour was his romantic liaison with Pocahontas, the chief's beautiful daughter, a story that has since become a popular legend. David Price's research upholds the legend in most respects, except that the man Pocahontas married was another Englishman, not Smith. Anyway, he tells it beautifully. NB

Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare (Vintage, £7.99)

Few contemporary male novelists are as unashamedly romantic as Nicholas Shakespeare. His latest book is a typically stylish tale about a young Englishman who has a one-night stand in Cold War Leipzig, and is then haunted for more than 20 years by the memory of the woman he knew simply as Snowleg. He returns to Leipzig in middle age and, although you know roughly where the narrative is heading, Shakespeare is artist enough to manufacture a genuinely heart-stopping denouement. Fine descriptions of the bleak German landscape complete a well-told tale. SC